Neil Gaiman on Poe ( remember it’s his 200th birthday)
Poe is a great read, I very much love many of his stories. In nonor of his 200th birthday Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction to a new collected work of Poe’s writings. Please find a excerpt below:
Neil Gaiman - Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems, stories, criticism, journalism. He was a working writer who kept himself alive with his words, for much of his life supporting, as best he could, his wife, who was his cousin Virginia (he married her when she was thirteen; she died aged twenty-five, having spent much of her time with him dying) and her mother, Muddy. He was vain, envious, good-hearted, morbid, troubled and a dreamer. He invented the form we now see as the detective story. He wrote tales of horror and of dread which even the critics admit were art. He had trouble with money and with drink for much of his life. He died in poverty and in hospital, in 1849, after a final week in which we have no knowledge of his movements — in all probability a lonely drunken week.While he lived he was America’s finest writer, a poet and a craftsman whose work made him very little money, even as his poems, such as “The Raven”, were widely quoted, adored, parodied and reviled, while writers he envied, such as Longfellow, were far more successful, commercially. Still, Poe, for all his short life and unfulfilled potential, remains read today, his finest stories as successful, as readable, as contemporary as anyone could desire. Fashions in dead authors come and go, but Poe is, I would wager, beyond fashion.
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